How to Save Money When You Buy Internet, Phone and Cable TV Services
In the early days of technology, you had to call your phone company to establish home phone service, and they would connect one or more phones that were hard-wired to the wall. If your house didn’t happen to already have phones installed, a technician would have to bring them and install them. And as technology progressed and cable TV service came into being, you pretty much had to accept whatever services and pricing your local cable company offered, even if they didn’t mean a good deal for you or you didn’t get the programming you desired. There wasn’t a lot of competition. The same was true for initial Internet service offerings.
Thankfully, it’s a whole different ballgame today. Not only do companies have more technological offerings than ever before, but there are more companies competing, many of which offer multiple home services. That diversity is great news for consumers, because it allows them to get diverse services from one provider and receive discounts for doing so.
The combining of services by a provider is called bundling, and it can be a great way to save money on services you’re going to buy anyway. It’s quite common for home phone, Internet and cable TV services to be bundled together, because there are many providers that offer all three. When you buy a package of services rather than purchase a la carte, it saves the provider money. They can then manage multiple types of services under one account, so they pass that savings on to you.
Although bundling usually involves predetermined packages, it doesn’t mean you have to take someone else’s idea of what a good combination of services means. There are usually many different configurations available, which allow you to choose the exact pricing and features that suit your needs.
And you don’t have to bundle all three services to make the concept cost-effective. For example, if you bundle cable television and Internet services , you would also be a good candidate for taking advantage of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone service, which uses cable’s Internet speed to provide clear voice transmission without a telephone line. This eliminates the need for regular home phone service. Since VoIP is less expensive in general and usually offers a huge array of free services you would have to pay for from the phone company; such as voice mail, call waiting, call forwarding, conference calling, video-conferencing and others; using it can save you quite a bit of money.